Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality

Astonishingly, the average age of first viewing porn is now 11.5 years for boys, and with the advent of the Internet, it’s no surprise that young people are consuming more porn than ever. And, as Gail Dines shows, today’s porn is strikingly different from yesterday’s Playboy. As porn culture has become absorbed into pop culture, a new wave of entrepreneurs are creating porn that is even more hard-core, violent, sexist, and racist. Proving that porn desensitizes and actually limits our sexual freedom, Dines argues its omnipresence is a public health concern we can no longer ignore.

Think porn culture isn’t a problem? You need to read this book! I am fortunate enough to have had the chance read Gail Dines’ book, Pornland. Dines’ describes how the porn industry operates *today*, in the 21st Century. She does this first by describing the men who created the industry as now know it: Hugh Hefner, Bob Guccione, and Larry Flynt. These men were excellent capitalists, not lovers of freedom. Dines provides evidence from women who’ve worked for them, and uses the pornographer’s own words as well, to prove her points.She then describes the hard-core pornography that has become mainstream today. The popular film series Girls Gone Wild depicts all women as being sexually available, Dines asserts, because women, specifically young, white women, are ready to undress and make-out with one another just for the thrill of knowing men are watching…or so one would think from watching Girls Gone Wild.Dines also addresses how both women and men are negatively influenced by the mainstream porn industry in their everyday life. Many heterosexual women are confused by why men are so interested in having anal sex; the increased focus on anal sex in pornography might have something to do with this. Likewise, the vast majority of teenage and twenty-something women in the U.S. have taken up shaving their pubic hair. This comes directly from porn, where women are typically shown hairless (liking pubic hair on a women is considered a fetish and there is a special genre of porn for it). This change in the way women take care of themselves has resulted in nurses changing the way they do rape-crises kits; they can no longer collect samples of public hair, as they once did.Anyone living in today’s society should pick up this book, as I really did not begin to touch on the arguments Dines makes. Everything she says comes from the view of a Marxist and leftist who is fed up with the left not taking the racist, misogynist, capitalist porn industry seriously, and indeed, coming up with every possible excuse of why not to do so.

Important, Gut Wrenching, Groundbreaking, Expose Gail Dines’ Pornland lives up to its billing as the culmination of the life’s work of one of the most reputable scholars of the effects of pornography on society. In it, Dines lays out an indictment of the pornography industry where only the pornography industry itself could vote “acquit.” She masterfully traces the history of pornography from the feud between Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler through the modern day mainstream “body punishing sex” and brutal violence of online pornography. Based on her several decades of research on pornography and its purveyors, she lays bare an industry that has violated women in every way imaginable and is now running out of ideas on how many ways to penetrate their orifices. Her book reveals to everyday pornography users and to people who haven’t ever seen pornography just how much porn is effecting our society, how violent it has become, and how much we all need to work to rid our society of its effects. Pornland is a call to action to reclaim a critical part of ourselves — our sexuality. Whether the reader understands the cause of pornography to be sin, patriarchy, oppression, whether the reader sees porn as an expression of healthy sexuality, an addiction, or a harmless pastime, all should read Dines’ critical look at this omnipresent influence on our society.